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Comment by bellerocky | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how Amazon comes up with names for its products, but recently they all strike me as weird and stupid names. Do they confer with marketing first? Zocalo, Cognito? Really? These are the kinds of names you invent when you're looking for a cheap domain name for your startup. For Amazon, they don't make a lot of sense. They just seem like some executive out of their marketing depth and out of touch trying to be clever and anyone with sense afraid to speak up during the meeting when they come up with these names.

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They're unique while remaining loosely related to the products they describe.

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%B3calo is the city center (of Mexico City's historical district), a simple and untaken metaphor for a service that "...provides users with a central location for both the documents and files they are...".

Great. You are 1 out of 100,000 people that understand the metaphor.

Out of their recently-launched services, I liked the name "MatchBook" the most. It was intended to provide cheap or free Kindle versions of books which you'd previously purchased physical versions of. Unfortunately, it's a product that virtually no publishers have adopted.

Amazon is a weird name too.

As were the originally proposed names "Cadabra" and "Relentless" (http://www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon).

Cognito means known, recognized, identified; contrast with incognito. Is that really such a terrible, horrible, no good name for a service that verifies user identities and manages user profile data?

It's a shame Amazon can't afford to hire a marketing genius like you, but I think they're doing the best they can with the idiots they have to work with.

But as a user enters cognito, they then become incognito. That does not make sense.

This. Maybe Amazon should have hired the marketing geniuses here on HN.

Zocalo, sure...but Cognito makes complete sense. The word incognito basically means anonymous. The prefix 'in-' frequently negates the meaning of the word it's attached to. So when you remove the negation from anonymous, you get a known identity, which seems very apropos to an identity service.

What cloud service names, off the top of your head, do you consider to be exemplary?

"Parse"? OK, sure...but that's not any more functionally descriptive than "Cognito"...and Parse is a more narrowly focused company with a primary service...In the case of "Cognito" and "Zocalo"..., Amazon has to come up with names that are distinctive because they provide so many core services...so many that even me, an engineer, get them confused. Imagine the difficulty of a fly-by marketing person trying to differentiate between similar sounding names.

Furthermore, these names are distinctive industry wide...presumably, if Zocalo becomes big, you will no longer have to say "AWS Zocalo", but just, "Zocalo"...just like you do with "S3" and "EC2".

To drive home the situation that Amazon is in, let's consider another great product name: Dropbox. Unlike Parse, it is very easy to relate to the core service. But consider the phrase, "Amazon Dropbox"..."Dropbox" is unique compared to the currently named AWS services...but it has a huge collision with Amazon's core service, which is, stocking and shipping products. If Dropbox.com didn't exist, and Amazon used it instead of "Zocalo"...there is a considerable risk that people associate "dropbox" with some kind of packaging thing.

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